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CTRL + H: This toggle visibility of all the floating windows. Use it to quickly clear the map for a bigger view.

CTRL + F: What is your FPS? This is displayed in the upper-left corner.

Zoom in to save resources: It is likely that most players can ignore this tip, but for those on older hardware or with low end video hardware… The Huntercoin map is very large with 252,004 cells and tens of thousands of hunters and a lot of coins. Displaying that amount of data takes computer resources (CPU & RAM). If you are on an older machine you can conserve resource by limiting the amount of time you spend zoomed out. You can also monitor how much power is being used with CTRL + F.

Plot interceptions: Use the “Show Direction” button to show you enemy paths. Then plot your intercept path by paying close attention to the numbers on the path lines. This can give you laser precision when hunting. However, make sure to check back that they haven’t changed their path! Also, consider that moves can take 1 or 2 blocks to get into the blockchain, so take “pending” time into account as well.

Use many teams: If you only play 1 team, you’re going to cry from boredom. Use as many teams as you feel comfortable with. You only need to make more than 1 HUC per team to be guaranteed profitable. Good players that make several hundred HUC a day use many teams.

Use many color teams: Don’t limit yourself to 1 color. You will not do well. Use more than 1 color, and use them in tandem with each other.

Get enough HUC: When you buy a few HUC, get a bit extra. Very long moves can cost you 0.005 HUC. Buy that tiny bit extra and save yourself some time so that you can make those long moves and come back later to check on them. You can buy HUC at https://www.poloniex.com/exchange/btc_huc. (Buy now while it’s cheap!)

LEAVE HUNTERCOIN RUNNING!: Unless you have a good reason to shut down Huntercoin, just leave it running. You will not need to wait for the blockchain to sync the next time you get back to playing then. If you do shut down Huntercoin, you will need to sync the blockchain again, and depending on how many blocks there are to sync, it could take a while. Huntercoin, like other crypto currencies, does not take up a lot of resources, and is better left running than shut down.

Your other option (and the best option) is to uncheck the “Restart Huntercoind process when game starts” and “Kill Huntercoind process at the end of the game” options in the settings. (Press the ESC key for the settings.) This will keep the daemon running and keep the blockchain sync’d for you. You can close Huntercoin: Mithril Edition, and then later restart it with the blockchain up to date.

Run a Virtual Machine (VM) and use multiple monitors: If you have multiple monitors, there’s no reason why you can’t run and watch both the MM client and the QT client at the same time. Get a VM running and run one of them in there.

Check the forum threads regularly: The Huntercoin: Mithril Edition is constantly undergoing changes with new features and improvements. (Some of the docs are bound to be wrong because of this.) Make sure to check the [ANN][HUC] Huntercoin – Mithril Edition Client forum thread in the Bitcoin Talk Forums whenever you have a question.

If you play Huntercoin in multiple locations with multiple computers: This has nothing to do with Huntercoin: Mithril Edition, but, it’s a solid tip… You can actually send your hunter teams between wallets! Use the “Config” in the QT client and enter an address from your other wallet into the “Transfer” text box. You must click “Go” for the transfer to take place, and you will also need to wait for the blockchain to pick up that command.

DEVELOPERS LOVE FEEDBACK!!!: Make sure to say “thank you” to Mithril Man at a minimum. Leave some constructive comments on what you like in his client, and leave some well thought out ideas for him as well if you have any. If you can spare a few HUC, make sure to tip him because nothing says “thank you” louder than a few coins! You can donate a few HUC to Mithril Man at this address: HMSCYGYJ5wo9FiniVU4pXWGUu8E8PSmoHE

For ADVANCED Players

Do NOT try any of these if you do not know what you are doing.

Set the datadir: For advanced users, you can set the folder that Huntercoin uses as the data directory. Normally the data directory is in %appdata%\huntercoin. The “-datadir=C:\Path\to\Huntercoin\data\folder” command can be set in the settings dialog, or can be set in the huntercoin.conf file as “datadir=C:\Path\to\Huntercoin\data\folder”. Use quotes for the full path if there are spaces.

Use a RAM disk: For advanced, advanced users, if you’re looking for further performance boosts, you can set the data directory to a RAM disk. However, ensure that your RAM disk is properly flushing memory to disk or you may lose data. DO NOT USE THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

Set the data directory to an SSD: If you have an SSD, use it for the data directory. You will get a performance boost.

Target

Selecting a hunter in the Cell Info window makes that hunter’s team your current “target”.

Double-click on a hunter, or click “Center on Map” to quickly navigate on the map to where that hunter is.

If “Show Direction” is not greyed out, click it to toggle the hunter’s path so that you know where he is going. Paths are even numbered so that you can see how many blocks it will take for that hunter to reach a particular square on the map. <– This is a killer feature that will help you play much better! (Especially against bots!)

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After you’ve entered the settings and restarted Huntercoin: Mithril Edition, the program will start the Huntercoin daemon and begin to sync the blockchain. If this is the first time that you’ve sync’d the blockchain, it could take a while, depending on your Internet connection speed. (On slow connections, expect it to take a day.)

The only thing you need at this point, is some patience. If you’ve ever downloaded a large MMORPG before, this is actually much faster.

At first, you will see a “Starting” and “Waiting” message like this:

“Waiting” will continue for a little while, and usually around 1~3 minutes.

Go get yourself a cup of tea.

When you get back from getting a drink, the program should be synchronizing the blockchain for you. This is the lengthy part, and depends on your Internet connection speed.

The ## days and hours that you see isn’t the time that you need to wait. Huntercoin is a real time game, so that’s just an indication of how far out of sync you are. On a fast connection, “1 day” of blocks should synchronize in a couple minutes or so.

You may see an “[!ERROR!][TIME]: System: The operation has timed out” message. This isn’t a problem as the game will continue to sync the blockchain. If you really like the updates, you can safely restart the program. The amount that you’ve already downloaded is already on your computer and won’t be lost. (See below.)

And when it’s finished, you’ll also see “New Game State Loaded, height:####”.

The “height” is the blockchain height, and is a measure of what “turn” the game is on at the moment.

But… what you’re really been waiting for has finally arrived!

THE BLOCKCHAIN IS NOW SYNC’D AND YOU’RE READY TO PLAY!

(The preview edition is “read-only”, so you can only “see” the game, but can’t play it. It is still very useful for getting some in-game intelligence about enemy movements as you will see.)

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Huntercoin is a crypto currency game that is played on the blockchain. This is significant, and particularly that “played on the blockchain” part.

The blockchain is a public ledger of account that can be used for currency transfers, assets, smart contracts, smart property, snippets of code, escrow, distributed companies, distributed property, and yes – even GAMES!

But all of that seems very distant, abstract, and probably even bizarre. What is a “smart contract”? What is a “distributed exchange”? What is…? What can I do practically? What use is this? How can I visualise this?

Forget all that. Let’s just play a game. Huntercoin… It will all become much clearer soon…

Players send orders to the Huntercoin network. They do this through client software, or what you might think of as “the game program”. Their orders are registered in the blockchain then read by all the other players as they download the latest block in the blockchain and process the orders for all the other players.

Since everything is done securely through cryptography, nobody can fake orders or ignore orders or change them. The only thing you can do is see what happened. We’ll look more at this below.

Now, if you’ve played Huntercoin, or if you’ve read in the forums, you’ll have encountered the deadly “Pending” monster that seems to go on forever sometimes. You’ll also see the game speed up or slow down.

I’m a bit fuzzy on “pending” and stuck transactions. You can run “huntercoin-qt.exe -rescan” though, and that should “unstick” the transaction. However, that will take a while for the client to start again. The other options are to “deletetransaction” or “rebroadcast” the transaction.

For the speeding up and slowing down issue, this is quite interesting. To understand what’s happening, you need to know a few basic things about crypto currency mining.

Miners all compete for a block. They solve very difficult mathematical puzzles that can take longer or shorter to solve. The difficulty factor changes to cause the problem to become more or less difficult, and that change regulates the time it takes to “find a block” to “about” 1 block every X minutes, depending on the coin.

Bitcoin blocks come at a rate of about 1 every 10 minutes. Litecoin takes about 2.5 minutes. Huntercoin has 2 algorithms, SHA-256 and scrypt, set to find blocks every 2 minutes, and averaging to 1 block per minute due to there being 2 algorithms.

As blocks are found on the Huntercoin blockchain, a turn is processed. Here’s a table showing some blocks found with the times and algorithms.

There you can see that the actual algorithm that finds a block fluctuates. You can also see a 7 second block, a 14 second block, and a 1:54 block. But the average time there is 53 seconds, which is pretty close to 1 minute. A larger sample would push that number closer to 1 minute.

Gamers that are expecting a perfectly linear flow-of-time will be disappointed. Time does not flow in a perfectly linear fashion on the blockchain – it flows in averages.

But this really only adds to the challenge of the game. It adds a dimension that we’ve not really seen before in real-time games – non-linear time. While some gamers will complain about this, they should embrace it as it is not going to change because that’s the nature of the blockchain. It’s simply better to accept it and deal with it. If you can use it to your advantage, that’s what we call “skill”.

In the game, since you’re publishing your orders, they are all out in the open for anyone to read. Here’s an actual example:

Under “1” you’ll see the x & y coordinates (248,435). You’ll also see “wp”, which is the set of waypoints for the hunter. Those are where the hunter will go, if nothing happens in the meantime.

So you can see exactly where players are going!

Does that ruin the game?

Absolutely not! At any time that hunter could change course or do something different at any time, e.g. destruct and kill surrounding hunters that are a different colour.

But sending those orders leaves the player free to do other things and not worry too much about sending more orders for that particular hunter. This balances the need to keep your plans secret with the need to not enter every single step.

So, what does this mean for playing so far? Well, probably that you should plan your moves 2 blocks ahead. When you send your orders by clicking the “Go” button, you often end up waiting for a couple blocks. A little bit of planning can remedy this, and your game will go a bit smoother.

That’s a quick look at Huntercoin, the blockchain, and how to play with a better understanding of the blockchain.

Hopefully I’ve given you a better understanding of Huntercoin and how it uses the blockchain to enable a game. And hopefully you can imagine other ways that the blockchain can be used for smart contracts, property, distributed companies, and many, many more as of yet unimagined uses for the blockchain.

If you’re not already onboard the Bitcoin/crypto train, it’s far from too late. This is early. Get on board for the fast-track to the future of transactional systems.

MithrilMan in the BTF is creating a new client for Huntercoin. It’s not ready quite yet, but I had the chance to test it along with 2 other people. The game client is coming along really well, and is extremely smooth.

We’re running on testnet, so the screenshots don’t show the full main game, but they do show some cool features that you’ll love when its released.

This is the full client running in maximized mode instead of full screen (click to open the full resolution):

There you can see how clicking on a hunter shows the entire team of hunters in the “Target” window. You can click to center on a hunter, or even show the direction that the hunter is traveling in.

The Cell Info window shows a specific hunter, and also the coordinates in the title bar:

It’s likely that there is more functionality yet to be implemented there, e.g. number of coins carried, etc., but so far, it’s coming along very well.

This video by Snailbrain (the Huntercoin creator) shows Mithril Man’s client. In it you can see paths that players are taking.

The chat window is significantly improved. Here’s a shot that shows how you can chat in multiple colours:

When was the last time you chatted with Bitcoin?

By choosing a tab, you can filter chats to show only 1 colour:

In the top left of the screen is a green “radar” screen that plots players on the screen. I’ve highlighted 2 portions to help you see how it works (click to open a larger version):

In there, where you click on the screen moves the radar around with the click-point being the center of the radar. You could use this at the edge of your screen to give you a quick peek at what’s off to the north/south/east/west without having to scroll. A very quick & useful tool.

The floating map lets you monitor another area of the screen, or immediately find the crown. It also has a checkbox that lets you follow the crown as it moves around.

That will certainly make getting the crown a much harder fight. If you’ve been in a fight for the crown, they last HOURS and leave countless destructed and killed hunters all over the map. It’s a non-stop bloodbath, and extremely exhilarating! For example, if 1 HUC is about $1, then owning the crown is worth almost $12,000 a month! (1 block per minute with 0.25 HUC per block.)

The Crown of Fortune is very much worth protecting and fighting for. And Mithril Man’s new floating map and direction finding is going to make future crown battles truly even bloodier!

So, the future of Huntercoin is looking very bright. More development. More tools. More of everything!

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My original title for this post was “Stop Begging for Huntercoins You Lazy Piece of Shit!” However, I figured that was a bit too direct. But either way, you can still get Huntercoins (HUC) for free if you follow a few simple steps below. Some will require that you do a bit of work or reading. If you want Huntercoins, and don’t want to do that, well, you’re a lazy piece of shit. Stop reading and go back to your pathetic life of grovelling at the feet of others. Those of you that have a bit of self-respect, read on!

Mine Dogecoins (or some other crypto currency)

Sell coins for BTC

Buy HUC

Play Huntercoin and make truckloads more coins!

It’s that simple. Not very hard. Yet there are countless people out there begging like pathetic worms for HUC.

For more information on mining… just search for it. It’s not that hard.

And you can get some free HUC there for as long as the giveaways last.

But for the love of Pete, don’t just spam everywhere asking for HUC. Stick to the begging and giveaway threads. I’ve given out hundreds of dollars of coins already. And I still have people begging for more. Give me a break! Give everyone a break!

Get some HUC. Kick ass in the games. But please, don’t grovel everywhere.

I’m doing CPU mining with older machines, and it’s turning out pretty well. You don’t need massive GPUs to mine it, though it helps as you’ll mine a lot more. There are some seriously heavy-duty miners active on it right now with some serious setups. My 50 KH/s is dwarfed by the fellow at the top mining at 8,622 KH/s. So, while I’ll not be a DOGE millionaire, its fun.

For those that are more profit oriented, people are buying DOGE for 0.1 BTC per million DOGE. If you check how many hashes you need to mine DOGE, it’s extremely good. So, whether you mine for profit or for fun, check out DOGE.

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I have FINALLY managed to get an LTC miner running on my Mac. The basic problem was that unless you do a lot of development on a Mac, you’re unlikely to have your machine set up properly for mining, and you’ll get missing library errors from the miner – libidn.11.dylib and libssl.1.0.0.dylib.

(I generally find that OS X is simply a shiny version of Unix that’s harder to use. Getting a miner running was further confirmation that anyone who is considering a Mac should just get some blazing fast hardware and slap on some Linux distro. But I digress… On to mining Litecoin on a Mac!)

First, upgrade OS X to 10.8 or whatever. Apple never supports anything older than from last week, so might as well get up to date.

Next, install the most recent version of Xcode, which is 4.6.1 at the moment. Why do you need to install development tools to mine litecoin? Because it’s a Mac. That’s why.

Once you’ve got that installed, install MacPorts. You’ll need to install some other things before installing that, but MacPorts walks you through it quite well.

Once you’ve got that done, you’ll need to make certain that you have the right libraries available for the miner. Open a terminal and run the following:

sudo port selfupdate

sudo port clean wget
sudo port install wget

sudo port clean openssl
sudo port install openssl

Otherwise you may end up with errors about missing libraries: libidn.11.dylib and libssl.1.0.0.dylib.